https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3818893.html

This is actually a lot less exciting than it sounds, a brisk history of white people's sexuality (a follow-up volume looks at Asia and Africa) looking also at historical understandings of marriage and other sexual arrangements. Philippe Brenot is a veteran French sexologist who has written two dozen other books on the subject, and artist Laetitia Coryn is a well-known bandes dessinées writer who is also an actor and voiceover artist. It's not especially erotic, though it's certainly descriptive. In general the points landed fairly and not too didactically; but the scope is not particularly broad. ( )

The text by Philippe Brenot, French psychiatrist specializing in sexology, is brought to life in the often quite funny images by the graphic artist Leatitia Coryn. It is a cultural history of changing sexual attitudes, morals and practices throughout the centuries from the very beginnings deduced from pre-historic images and artifacts to a speculative look into the future concentrating on European societies (circumcision and female genital mutilation, customs that may have originated in ancient Egypt are mentioned). Very thorough and well founded in every detail as far as I can tell, and as old and wise as I am, I was still able to learn something new. The authors are certainly not caught in moral prejudices, in any social vices or in religious dogmatism: only by fully and joyfully experiencing sexual and erotic pleasures including masturbation one becomes fully human. Playful seriousness and serious playfulness – and ironic sarcasm at the all too often incomprehensible human foolishness in giving others a miserable life and elevating oneself to an infinitely superior being by wallowing in one’s own misery. It’s a playful pleasure this book! (XII-16) ( )

Very odd, very French project to summarise the social and cultural history of human sexuality in the form of a comic strip. In some other cultures, perhaps, the absence of such a thing might not have been seen as a big gap in the market. The author, Philippe Brenot, is a psychiatrist who has published works on male sexual violence, fantasy, and masturbation, so the text does come with a certain academic cachet – sweetened here by the simple, playful illustrations of Laetitia Coryn, an artist known mainly for her work on the short-lived BD revue AAARG! Her pictures are all bold primary colours and minimal background detail, the characters realistic enough to be anatomically correct, but cartoonish enough to be fairly inoffensive no matter what activities they're engaged in.

With more than 200 pages here – the average BD album is usually around fifty – there is plenty of space to explore the subject, and indeed we get into a surprising amount of detail on subjects ranging from primate evolutionary biology, to Classical paederasty, medieval legends and religious sensitivity, the development of contraception, concepts of female virtue and virginity, masturbation, literary censorship, psychiatry, VR porn and almost everything in between – though never more than a page or so on each. Hard to know who the audience for this is supposed to be, but I quite enjoyed myself – and learnt a few things too. Not least about the French publishing market. ( )